[Open] Science Sunday – 13.12.09

More Sunday sharing thanks to the people in the internet and Open Access …

ASCILITE is over, but it left me with a lot of work to do because of the great sessions in the conference. You can get a lot of the information covered there thanks to Grainne Conole on Cloudworks. I also posted some interesting resources on my FriendFeed page.

We’ve come a long way baby

The Wikipedia entry for Brain-Computer Interfaces, describes a prototype done in 1978. It was successful in having a man blinded as an adult perceive the sensation of light. But (continue reading), its operation required being “hooked up to a two-ton mainframe”. Well, things have changed, and a recent article by Frank H. Guenther, Jonathan S. Brumberg, E. Joseph Wright, Alfonso Nieto-Castanon, Jason A. Tourville, Mikhail Panko, Robert Law, Steven A. Siebert, Jess L. Bartels, Dinal S. Andreasen, Princewill Ehirim, Hui Mao, Philip R. Kennedy published in PLoS One talks about a wireless brain-machine interface that could be used to produce synthetic speech for individuals with speech impairments. You can read the article here, and Brandon Keim has a great take on it on Wired Science.

I was contacted by Jose Barbosa from 95bFM’s Sunday Breakfast, and we got to chatting about brains. You can find the recording of the radio segment here. And thanks to Jose, who found the link to Jeremy Corfield’s thesis on the kiwi brain.